| | I would say that Galt's speaking of the Garden of Eden and the essence of what is the Christian view of man's relationship to God speaks much regarding Christianity - you cannot have Christianity without the Cross, and cannot have the Cross without the Original Sin gambit of the Garden of Eden, and that bespeaks not of just the fundamentalists, but of all who call themselves Christians...
Shit, you're right about that part of the book, how could I have forgotten. This has got to be what she's talking about, no?
As far as the statement itself, it is not universally accurate, it cannot be applied to all Christians.
Universalists, for instance, acquired their name because they rejected damnation. As in universal salvation. Unitarians theirs because they rejected the Trinity.
There are Christians who reject pretty much the entire Old Testament. It's important to realize how much mainstreaming and cleaning up got done in the interest of political expediency- consider what Constantine did, he's responsible for most of it. The deleting part (say, gnostic scripture) has been going on forever, it's part and parcel of the history of organized Christianity. Which leads me to Peter (not the biblical one) saying:
For the record, the Garden of Eden story comed from the Old Testament, which both Christians and Jews purport to believe (maybe Moslems, too).
The Garden of Eden is a story/myth that is duplicated in one form or another all over the world. As it appears in the Old Testament (which is like saying after it went through the world's biggest editing and translation clusterfuck), it evolved from earlier myths. I'm not a theologian or a Christian, but I do dig in pretty deep sometimes. If you go down to the very earliest texts and really sweat out learning translation conventions, what you see is something that is at a much more what I'd call "core" level of myth. I mean, sometimes you have a very different situation with the snake, even... :) I'm not kidding! If you ever want to get a feel for that, go online somewhere and look at the gnostic scriptures. And that's not even where it started, that's just some of the earliest writing that has been recovered. It's the same thing with Jesus, and the Gospel of St. Thomas (that's the most high-profile example). You start to see a very different picture of Xstianity. Not suprising that many of the people who look into these things are Christians, and it very much modifies and enriches their understanding.
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